Persona: Through a Projector Darkly

All but the most conceptually adventurous movie-watchers experience meta-cinematic devices as an imposition. I don’t mean the vivid colors of a Sirk melodrama or the dramatic lighting of Argento’s most daring gialli. What I have in mind are halting breaks in the story, actors spliced into the flow of the narrative discussing their own characters, those qualities that not only ask the audience to keep in mind that it is watching a movie but also to reflect on what it means to be watching a performance within a specific medium, self-consciously under the control of a director. The French New Wave in a nutshell.

Naturally, the next question is: what am I feeling as a result of this alienation, what Brecht would call the Verfremdungseffekt? What purpose is this device serving in relation to the viewing experience? Am I now conscious of myself merely as a moviegoer? Have I gained some special insight into what cinema is or why I watch films? Have I, like some Manchurian Candidate, heard the whispered code words, now ready for political action?

I am not talking about what the director or writer intend any more than I am the meaning of a film, if it could even be so reduced. You could explain to me all day why Godard does what he does, but it does not get us very far if I don’t feel it. And my not feeling it may be natural enough. Political circumstances change; prior knowledge fades and must be re-appropriated. What we ask ourselves, I contend, is what effect the device has on us. Are we left cold? Another postmodern ploy among a plethora?

Often, that is the case. But not so with Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966), which remains attractive and enigmatic without feeling like a proto-postmodern exercise in coolness. There’s nothing showy or trite about the despair Bergman inhabits. He never loses himself in a labyrinth of neurotic fluidity (a certain Charlie Kaufman comes to mind). Persona is a God’s honest narrative, one well-told and entirely legible on its surface. At the same time, it owes everything to Bergman’s formalistic sensibilities. Its prologue and recursions are legendary.

But why these devices if the story is so straightforward? What’s it to me? Recently during my first viewing, I could not shake the gendered-ness of it all. Persona is a film in which the only men who appear are 1) potentially dreamed, 2) the director and cinematographer, 3) silent film actors not “in the movie” proper, or 4) an erect penis, face unseen. Our two main characters are both women, both mirroring one another to the point of indistinction. Even the doctor, the only “real” other character, is a woman. Such could not have been common in 60s Sweden.

These facts got me thinking about how these women are portrayed. Their concerns take something like traditional form: worries about marriage, children, and careers. But they cut deeper, suggest far more than the typical (and I invoke this bar advisedly) Bechdel-Test-failing film. One of them goes on at length about an aberrant sexual encounter in such detail and with such stated, though fearful, relish that it is hard not see male desire at play. I will not pretend no woman has ever wanted to be sexually free, to be the object of affection of voyeurs. But the way Bergman writes the scene, the vividness, suggests libidinal investment.

Our two main characters, then, are male constructions of femininity with the desires and conflicts one such as Bergman might imagine a successful actress and a young nurse might experience. We might even say Persona implies the fungibility of women or at least these women—the famous split-and-sutured shot of their faces says as much. Of course, this is always the case when a male writer drafts female characters in an abstract way. But Bergman’s technique will not let us forget it.

It’s even odder, then, that I have encountered a number of reviews in which women feel seen by the movie. Is this a case of Bergman’s genius? He simply knew women that well? Or do we have a historical development of women’s self-conceptions, one in which media have bequeathed them modes of self-understanding influenced by movies like Persona? Or does the draw of the master simply lead some to slot themselves into his mode of seeing?

With Bergman’s movies, there are rarely answers. I certainly can’t pretend to have one here. But that hardly seems to be a problem. Persona has got me thinking. And that’s more than a start.